There is a point near the end of Amity Gaige's Schroder , when the narrator, Erik, exhorts the police to pass on a message to the six-year-old daughter he has been on the run with for the past week. "I love you and I will always love you. Thank you. Thank you. This was the best part of my life." It is hard to conceive of how Gaige will make a liar and a child abductor (for that is essentially what Erik Schroder is; at one point he even attempts to stuff his daughter in the boot of his car) sympathetic, but in the words of one of Schroder's many fans, Jonathan Franzen, "seldom has such a daring concept for a novel been grounded in such an appealing character".

Schroder is Gaige's first book to be published in the UK and is written in the form of a confession to the narrator's estranged wife about why he took their daughter, and what they did while they were gone. The press is calling their trip a kidnapping, but Schroder says "the word abduction is all wrong. It was more like an adventure we both embarked upon in varying levels of ignorance and denial." The novel is also a window into why, as a child immigrant from east Berlin, Erik Schroder took to calling himself Eric Kennedy – "the surname wasn't hard to choose. I wanted a hero's name, and there was only one man I'd ever heard called a hero in Dorchester" – and has lived under that name ever since.

Gaige, who , was named one of the National Book Foundation's five outstanding emerging writers in 2006. She was partially inspired by the true story of the German conman Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who posed as Clark Rockefeller for years and kidnapped his daughter. "I just thought it was so interesting – this was somebody with so many layers to him," she says. "I was already preoccupied with the themes his story contained, of parenthood and identity, and here was the perfect example of a character who invented himself."I wanted to peel away all the levels of him, looking at those themes I've always been interested in, especially identity – who we are in relation to one another. And when I became a parent, the stakes seemed to get higher on those questions, so my becoming a mother was probably the primary inspiration."

Schroder has drawn comparisons to Lolita – both are narrated by an eminently articulate man on the run with a young girl – but Gaige's writer is no Humbert Humbert, she says. "You think of Lolita and he's a total monster, [but] Erik has such a soft side. He genuinely loves his daughter… it's a desperate love, loving someone so much it feels desperate. I don't think he's a bad person," she says. "But I burst out laughing with glee at even getting mentioned in the same sentence as Nabokov."